Ontology of Poker

Description

There is blind chess but there is no blind poker. This is because to play poker essentially involves the use of cards and chips (or representations of or proxies for cards and chips). A game of chess, in contrast, may involve only the exchange of speech acts. We draw initial conclusions for the ontology of poker from this distinction.
Talk presented on March 14, 2014
For video presentation see http://www.youtube.com/edit?video_id=PgwpR9NPKzw

The Ontology of Poker Barry Smith with thanks to Ingvar Johansson and John Kearns Revised version of slides from talk presented in Buffalo on March 14, 2014

We start with John Searle’s ontology of social reality (version of 1995) 2

This is a president 3

This is a cathedral 4

This is a driver’s license 5

Searle’s Ontology x counts as y in context C This human being counts as a president This stone edifice counts as a cathedral This piece of paper counts as a driver’s license x is physical, y is social / institutional / deontic 6

Problem for this Theory money in bank accounts, debts, rights, prices, permissions, … Here there is no (physical) x term  “Free-standing y terms” (quasi-abstract entities) In olden times; such y terms exist because there are memories in people’s heads Now, often: the y terms exist because there are physical artifacts (above all: documents) which record / represent their existence  A new ontology of social reality based on the role of document acts and recording devices 7

8

Document acts many kinds of human action involve documents Signing a will in front of witnesses allows the creation of an estate, showing a passport at a border post allows a legal entry into a new country, … 9

Surely document acts are just speech acts Speech act is, after all, translated into French as acte du langage Austin and Searle do indeed comment that speech acts can be performed in writing But if we examine the contents of standard texts on speech act theory we do not find sections on: and so forth 10 registering documents serving documents signing documents amending documents authenticating documents destroying documents

Perhaps can support the Dispensability of Documents Thesis documents are involved only inessentially in acts of, for instance, making a will or legally entering a foreign country: in sufficiently small village communities wills would not be needed in sufficiently small countries passports would not be needed 11

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Hypothesis (against the Dispensability thesis) Even in small societies of friendly individuals who know each other, share memories, accept the same rules, and do not cheat there are human activities which essentially involve the use of documents or equivalent physical supports / recording devices We shall argue that poker is one such 14

Strategy 1. A very short ontology of war 2. A very short ontology of chess 3. The special case of blind chess 4. Poker 15

Chess is played in small societies of friendly individuals who know each other, share memories, accept the same rules, and do not cheat chess does not essentially involve anything beyond thoughts and speech acts (and memory) 29

But what is here the game ? 30

But what is here the game ? thoughtsthoughts speech acts speech acts 31

Is the game just a sequence of speech acts? Neither thoughts nor utterances are parts of the game speech acts merely represent the movements of the pieces But here there are here no movements and no pieces 32

The game is something abstract but historical Normal chess is a set of physical movements which count as a game of chess. Blind chess is a free standing y event It is a sequence of board-constellations (as represented in chess notation). It is a historical sequence (the game was played by specific parties, and it came into existence through a certain series of actions on their part) but in and of itself it has only the sorts of quasi- mathematical properties which are possessed by debts or prices 33

Game of blind chess: a free- standing y-event thoughtsthoughts speech acts speech acts 34 an abstract pattern tied to specific parties and to a specific series of events

Blind chess game = free- standing y event Note that a similar ontological assay could not be applied in the case of war There could be no such thing as blind war? Why not? (Perhaps in the future war on the internet, à la Stuxnet, bitcoin, will become possible …) 36

Hypothesis (against the Dispensability thesis) There can be no such thing as blind poker (= poker played entirely via speech acts) 37

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We are here interested in live poker ‘live poker’: A retronym for poker played with at a table with cards, as opposed to video poker or online poker . http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_poker_terms 39

Two senses of ‘blind’ 1. You can’t see the (poker) faces 2. You can’t see the cards 40

41

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43 http://www.pokeronlineformoney.org/online-poker- sites/

Two senses of ‘blind’ 1. You can’t see the (poker) faces • We assume in what follows that faces are visible (and that reading faces is an essential part of normal poker) 1. You can’t see the cards 44

Two senses of ‘blind’ 1. You can’t see the (poker) faces 2. You can’t see the cards • because there are no cards (not even digital images of cards ), and there are no chips – just thoughts, speech acts, and memories 45

Why not a game of blind poker? The problem is not memory: Really good poker players have phenomenal memories for the cards that have been dealt, and for the bets that have been laid. The first problem is this: “The object of poker is to make money. That’s the way the game is scored.” D. Sklansky, The Theory of Poker, 1999 You don’t play poker with your children for fun 46

Could there be a game of poker in a small village barter economy? No chips, no tokens, no dollar bills, no IOU notes We would need a dealer whom everyone trusts. Each player commits one cow to the game, communicating his commitment to the dealer who holds the cow in (documentless) escrow. Bets are denominated in 1/1000s of a cow. … 47

The problem, rather, is one of secrecy vs. openness in poker (in contrast to chess) not everything is in the open. Cards have a face and a back Chess in contrast is a perfect information game: chess pieces only have a face Surely, we might say, games requiring partial exposure and partial concealment can't be blind 48

The dealer would have to be dealing blind We would need a dealer outside the game who is able to communicate secretly with the players what the cards are in their respective hands. The dealer, too, would need to have a phenomenal memory – he would need to know what cards all the players have, and what bets they have laid, at every stage of the game. 49

Further problems The dealer would need communicate secretly to the players e.g. via audio signals transmitted through earplugs But sometimes the players would need to communicate secretly with the dealer To do this, they would need to leave the room e.g. to inform the dealer about cards they want to throw into the muck (when there are physical cards, this just involves laying the cards face down onto the discard pile) 50

In chess, people cannot cheat We are assuming that, in normal poker, people also do not cheat. But there is still a difference – in chess everything is open to the players involved. In poker, only some things are open, and this allows bluffing (both via sizes of bets placed and via body language). Knowing how to bluff and how to detect bluffing are skills that are essential to good play. Bluffing is not a form of cheating 51

Poker involves essential randomness Cards are essential to poker in a way in which chess pieces are not essential to chess because poker essentially involves chance: shuffling the cards serves to create essential randomness If cards were dispensed with, the dealer would need a randomness generator when assigning card labels to successive players 52

Even if players and dealers had perfect memories, there would still have to be something like a recording (documentation) of these labels in the CPU of the machine (this not [only] to prevent cheating, but simply in order to allow generation of the card labels) the information of what cards have already been dealt has to be stored in the randomness generator so that new card labels can be generated from those which would remain in the deck – this is a defeat for the Dispensability thesis 53

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